Ahead of her ambitious Cornucopia tour reaching the UK in November, we select the greatest work by the Icelandic pop-polymath
An overlooked gem, tacked on to the end of her fan-selected Greatest Hits collection, It’s in Our Hands is a sublime slice of future R&B conjured up in collaboration with the avant-techno duo Matmos. There is a particularly spicy and formidable version included on the Vespertine Live album.
Continue reading...Author highlights evidence suggesting that ‘orphanage tourism’ drives families apart and makes children vulnerable to abuse
JK Rowling has called on students around the world not to volunteer at orphanages, pointing to emerging evidence that “orphanage tourism” drives family separation and child trafficking.
Speaking at the One Young World summit in London, the global forum for young leaders, the Harry Potter author and founder and president of children’s charity Lumos, said orphanages do “irreparable harm” and “perpetuate the abuse” of children and communities.
Continue reading...Band reveal details of double album Sunrise and Sunset among ads for bales of hay and whitegoods
Coldplay has revealed the tracks of its new album by placing ads in the classified sections of newspapers around the world.
They started close to home with local papers in north Wales and Devon but also included Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald, the Otago Daily Times in New Zealand and Le Monde in France.
Continue reading...They’ve conquered the box office. Now it’s payback time. As they are attacked by filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, are TV and movie superheroes fighting a losing battle against reality?
Alan Moore’s celebrated 1986 series Watchmen revolved around a conspiracy to kill off masked vigilantes, and in effect that’s what it did in real life. Compared with the complex, mature, literary nature of Watchmen, most other comic-book titles looked juvenile and two-dimensional. This was at a time when “comic-book movies” meant Christopher Reeve’s wholesome Superman series, and when the only inhabitant of the Marvel movie universe was Howard the Duck. The entire industry had to up its game, and a new era of mature “graphic novels” was born.
Now we appear to have come full circle – which is fitting for a story so heavy with clock symbolism. With uncanny timing, HBO’s lavish new Watchmen series arrives at a moment when comic-book movies are again in what you might call a decadent phase of the cycle. They have decisively conquered our screens and our box offices, with ever grander and more improbable forms of spectacle, to the extent that we’re now beginning to question how much more of them we need. Could Watchmen kill off the superheroes once again?
Continue reading...Curators have added 1,000 selfies to Auckland Museum’s permanent photography collection after calling on the public to submit them. ‘Our collection holds more than 3m photographs, dating back to the early days of photography, and a part of my role is to ensure our collection continues to reflect trends,’ says its curator of pictorial, Shaun Higgins. ‘The selfie is a present-day photographic phenomenon that can’t be overlooked’
• Insider’s guide to Auckland: a multicultural melting pot by the sea
Continue reading...Sources tell Hollywood reporter Bruce Lee’s daughter raised concerns over the film’s portrayal of the martial arts star
Quentin Tarantino will not edit Once Upon a Time in Hollywood to placate Chinese censors, the Hollywood Reporter said.
Related: Bruce Lee's daughter hits out at father's portrayal in Tarantino film
Continue reading...Louvre will host works of Italian artist after long-running political spats and legal battles
The most important blockbuster art show in Paris for half a century took 10 years to prepare and was nearly thwarted by the worst diplomatic standoff between Italy and France since the second world war. With days to go before the opening, there is still no sign of whether one of the major works will appear.
The Louvre’s vast Leonardo da Vinci exhibition to mark 500 years since the death of the Italian Renaissance master will finally open next week as the world’s most-visited museum prepares to handle a huge influx of visitors.
Continue reading...Anger grows at culture of exploitation and failure of agencies to protect performers
The death this week of the South Korean singer and actor Sulli has turned the spotlight on the darkest corners of the highly pressurised K-pop industry and sparked anger over the failure of management agencies to protect their stars from the menace of “toxic fandom”.
Sulli, a former member of the group f(x), had spoken publicly about her mental health problems and shock at her death has led to calls for greater support for performers. Authorities said she was suffering from severe depression and are investigating suicide as a possible cause of death.
Continue reading...Partners Jurgen Mossack and Ramon Fonseca want US court to stop the film being released on Friday
The partners of the offshore law firm whose confidential files were exposed in the Panama Papers leak, Mossack Fonseca, have launched defamation action against Netflix over a movie about the scandal that is due to be released on Friday.
In a US lawsuit filed on Tuesday, Jurgen Mossack and Ramon Fonseca say The Laundromat, in which they are respectively played by Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas, portrays them as “ruthless uncaring lawyers who are involved in money laundering, tax evasion, bribery and/or other criminal conduct” and ask the court to stop it from being screened.
Continue reading...The judges staged a ‘joyful mutiny’ to name the pair joint winners of the literary prize. And that’s not all that unites them
It was clear that things were not going to plan when, just half an hour before the guests began to arrive, the judges of this year’s Booker prize had yet to make a decision. Five hours after they had begun their deliberations, they finally emerged in a state of “joyful mutiny” to announce that they had decided to break with convention, throw out the rule book and anoint two winners rather than the usual one.
By happy coincidence, Bernardine Evaristo is the same age that Margaret Atwood was when, in 2000, she first won the Booker prize with The Blind Assassin. “And I’m happy that we’ve both got curly hair,” quipped Atwood as they took to the stage arm in arm. They talk about it again the following morning, comparing notes about hair etiquette and handy products for curls. “People used to review my hair back in the day,” says Atwood.
Continue reading...Decision to make first black female winner, Bernardine Evaristo, share £50,000 prize with Margaret Atwood causes controversy
The Booker prize judges’ decision to break the rules and jointly award the prize to Margaret Atwood and Bernadine Evaristo has been criticised, with detractors pointing out that the first black woman ever to win Britain’s most prestigious literary award has had to share it – while receiving half the usual money.
Chair of the judges Peter Florence shocked the literary world on Monday night when he revealed that the jury had decided – unanimously, he said – to flout rules, which have been in place since 1992, that the Booker “may not be divided or withheld”. After more than five hours of deliberation, he announced that this year’s £50,000 award would be split between Atwood’s follow-up to The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments, and Evaristo’s polyphonic novel Girl, Woman, Other. Told in the voices of 12 different characters, mostly black women, Evaristo has said that the novel, her eighth, stems from the fact that “we black British women know that if we don’t write ourselves into literature, no one else will”.
Continue reading...Farrow’s book Catch and Kill describes Harvey Weinstein’s efforts to silence alleged victims and put Farrow himself off the story
The combination of rage, threats, professional promises and vulnerability that Harvey Weinstein used to secure the silence of women he allegedly sexually attacked is described in a newly disclosed interview between one of his accusers and Ronan Farrow, the journalist who exposed the Hollywood mogul.
In his new book Catch and Kill chronicling his investigation into Weinstein, Farrow relates for the first time details of his conversation with a longtime former employee of the movie producer, Alexandra Canosa.
Continue reading...The singer and former f(x) member, who was the victim of online bullying, had severe depression, according to police
The K-pop star and actor Sulli has been found dead at the age of 25. Police said that the celebrity, born Choi Jin-ri, was discovered unconscious at her Seongnam residence on 14 October.
“Her manager visited her home after failing to reach her since their last call the night before,” Seongnam police said, adding that Sulli had been experiencing severe depression. “It seems that she took her own life but we are also looking into other possibilities.”
Continue reading...Progress towards equality in the entertainment industry has been patchy, say campaigners
Two years ago, the entertainment industry became the primary focus of discussions over abuse, harassment and decades of ingrained sexism after allegations against Harvey Weinstein rocked Hollywood and kickstarted the wider #MeToo movement.
While a raft of initiatives have been introduced, including Time’s Up, a group that provides legal support to victims, and 50/50 x 2020, a gender parity pledge that all major film festivals have signed up to, industry experts said change has been glacial.
Continue reading...The 14 carvings will hang from the ceiling in arts venue The Box, due to open in the spring
A collection of 19th-century wooden figureheads from British naval warships has been lovingly restored from the ravages of years at sea and will form a striking display at a new heritage and arts complex in Plymouth.
The 14 figureheads, some of which were so badly water-damaged that their insides had turned into a soggy mulch, are to be suspended from the ceiling of The Box gallery and museum, which is due to open in the spring.
Continue reading...Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and – especially – Joe Pesci turn in performances of wintry brilliance in Scorsese’s epically daring late stage mob masterpiece
Martin Scorsese returns with his best picture since GoodFellas and one of his best films ever. It’s a superbly acted, thrillingly shot epic mob procedural about violence, betrayal, dishonesty and emotional bankruptcy starring Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and Al Pacino, set in a time before “toxic masculinity” had been formally diagnosed but when everyone lived with the symptoms. The film has been talked about for the hi-tech “youthification” technology which allows De Niro to appear as a younger man: it’s no more artificial than the traditional wigs, latex etc and it’s amazing how quickly you get used to it. De Niro’s eyes achieve an eerie, gluey gleam in this manifestation as a digital ghost from his past.
These are men conducting their business with sorrowful hints and shrugs and mutterings about who has gone too far, who has not shown respect, who will need to be persuaded to attend a sit-down to straighten this whole thing out. These solemnly or cordially euphemistic encounters in a subdued steakhouse light periodically explode into violence or dreamlike scenes of choreographed catastrophe, punctuated by gunshots or visceral jukebox slams on the soundtrack. And all given a queasy new resonance of political conspiracy and bad faith.
Continue reading...Svetlana Alexievich gave a lecture last week commemorating the work of murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya. Alexievich’s book Last Witnesses: Unchildlike Stories was published in June in the UK, more than three decades after it first appeared in the USSR to critical acclaim. It is based on interviews with a Soviet generation that experienced the second world war as children and has lived ever since with trauma. In 2015 Alexievich, now 71, won the Nobel prize for literature. The committee praised “her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time”. She lives in Minsk, Belarus, and is currently writing books about love and death.
Why are you in the UK?
I came because of Anna [Politkovskaya]. I loved and respected her so much. We met in 2005 at a prize ceremony in Oslo. There were many people there but Anna was somehow on her own, separate from the others. She was a person of extreme integrity bordering on fanaticism. We had a coffee, talked. There was one theme that united us: war. She was traumatised, at that point very close to a nervous breakdown, and full of pain and frustration. Anna was unhappy that she couldn’t explain the situation [in Chechnya]. She wasn’t able to make the west understand. She told me about the threats she was receiving. Her assassination [in 2006] came as a complete shock. I knew from our conversations that she was more or less prepared for this to happen. As a writer, I imagine what she was going through when she entered the lift of her apartment and the killer was there. It’s hard to imagine.
Long conference calls and bad-tempered threats: an exclusive extract from Ronan Farrow’s book Catch And Kill
By fall 2017, I had taken my story to the New Yorker. As the investigation moved closer to publication, I called the Weinstein Company for comment. Sounding nervous, an assistant said he’d check if the boss was available. And then there was Weinstein’s husky baritone. “Wow!” he said with mock excitement. “What do I owe this occasion to?” The writing about the man has seldom lingered on this quality: he was pretty funny. But he veered swiftly toward fury. Weinstein hung up on me several times that fall, including on that first day. I told him I wanted to be fair, to include anything he had to say, then asked if he was comfortable with me recording. He seemed to panic, and was gone with a click. The pattern repeated that afternoon. But when I got him to talk for a sustained time, he abandoned his initial caution and got sharply combative.
“How did you identify yourself to all these women?” he demanded. I was caught off balance. I had started reporting the story for NBC, before turning to the New Yorker.
Continue reading...Forster was a versatile character actor whose career was unexpectedly rescued by his Oscar-nominated role in Quentin Tarantino’s cult thriller
Robert Forster, the handsome and omnipresent character actor who got a career resurgence and Oscar nomination for playing bail bondsman Max Cherry in Jackie Brown, died on Friday. He was 78.
Publicist Kathie Berlin said Forster died of brain cancer following a brief illness. He was at home in Los Angeles, surrounded by family, including his four children and partner Denise Grayson.
Continue reading...At 87, le Carré is publishing his 25th novel. He talks to John Banville about our ‘dismal statesmanship’ and what he learned from his time as a spy
I have always admired John le Carré. Not always without envy – so many bestsellers! – but in wonderment at the fact that the work of an artist of such high literary accomplishment should have achieved such wide appeal among readers. That le Carré, otherwise David Cornwell, has chosen to set his novels almost exclusively in the world of espionage has allowed certain critics to dismiss him as essentially unserious, a mere entertainer. But with at least two of his books, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) and A Perfect Spy (1986), he has written masterpieces that will endure.
Which other writer could have produced novels of such consistent quality over a career spanning almost 60 years, since Call for the Dead in 1961, to his latest, Agent Running in the Field, which he is about to publish at the age of 87. And while he has hinted that this is to be his final book, I am prepared to bet that he is not done yet. He is just as intellectually vigorous and as politically aware as he has been at any time throughout his long life.
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